• Supremacy Over Partnership: What Reconciliation Rules Mean
• The Cold Hard Vagaries
• Tax cuts for the rich, tax increases for 35% of NJ taxpayers: Effects of the proposed tax cuts on NJ
• A Moment for Dickey

Readers of this week’s e-newsletter from the office of Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen may well have wished for a piece of paper to flip over in search of the real news.  Absent from the litany of achievements was any mention of the massacre in Las Vegas that gripped so many of his constituents, let alone any fruitful conversation on how the federal government might work to reduce the frequency and death toll of such horror. He was able to discuss some policies protecting children on the internet but didn’t mention that he’d allowed ChIP, the federal health insurance program for children, to lapse, or say when he might get around to covering the 9 million current recipients.

Most telling, the newsletter also failed to mention that Rep. Frelinghuysen was one of only two New Jersey lawmakers to vote “yes” with a slim partisan majority on a budget resolution, a bill not only devastating in itself, but designed explicitly to soften the passage of a GOP tax plan that promises to cost more than a quarter of household in New Jersey an average of over $2,400. One wonders how he could stay silent on such a move.  

Supremacy Over Partnership: What Reconciliation Rules Mean

Last week Congressional Republicans displayed an ironclad determination to pass the tax reform they want without a smidge of Democratic help (or even opinions). The cornerstone of this effort is a parliamentary maneuver called reconciliation.

What does that mean, exactly?